It has been my experience that the number of places that Steinway has put the serial number into their pianos has varied quite a lot. There was at least one era (late '70's plus or minus some amount) where I haven't found them anywhere but on the plate, so I'm glad to hear that I can look on top of the lyre. (I don't take lyres off unless I need to!) In fact I have a piano in mind now whose lyre I'm actually looking forward to removing! It is a good idea to check the lyre case number (usually a letter followed by 1 to 4 numbers) just to be sure that lyre was fitted to that piano in the factory. Sometimes the lyre has been switched, and that can be misleading. We have a local reseller who is notorious for such things... Note that there is another, similar, number to be found sometimes: the action number. It is the same format, and my understanding is that it tracks the keyframe, etc. until it is fitted to the piano, at which point the case number is affixed. So the keyframe can have three numbers: action, case and serial. It is at least theoretically possible to get a serial number from Steinway's books by knowing the case number and the era. (The case numbers start over when they get to Z.) The era can usually be deduced by various clues from the piano itself. (Note that the above reflects my still incomplete understanding of things Steinway--I'm grateful for any corrections or additions!) Doug Wood Piano Technician School of Music University of Washington dew2 at u.washington.edu (206) 543-3514 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut_ptg.org/attachments/20090506/ba4511e1/attachment.html>
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